Hi. My name is Mike Greiner and I’m a bankruptcy attorney here with the financial law group located in Warren, Michigan in Macomb county. Our website is financiallawgroup.com and our phone number is 586-693-2000. We do offer free consultations for people interested in this process. I’m here to talk to you today about the interaction between divorce law and bankruptcy law in particular with respect to real estate. Now something that’s become an issue in a lot of cases has been the fact that divorce decrees often have some type of requirement whereby the spouse whose keeping the house after the divorce would have to refinance the house within a certain period of time, often times that’s two years. Well the problem that a lot of people are finding right now is because of the real estate market and the drop in real estate values, that they’re not able to refinance the houses. And it really creates quite a quandry for people going forward. What I’ve suggested to some of my clients actually is instead of some type of drop dead line by which the house needs to be refinanced or, then something needs to be done.

Something which usually nobody really has any idea how to resolve it, because the house can’t be sold, because it’s not worth as much the, as is owed on the mortgages, and the house can’t be refinanced, because it’s not worth as much as our mortgages. What I’ve suggested instead is some type of obligation whereby the spouse who’s keeping the house has to make an application to refinance the house every year, and provide proof of that application to the spouse who’s not keeping the house, and that if it’s turned down, then the obligation rolls over to the following year, and that just continues until the house is able to be refinanced. And then, upon the house being refinanced, the spouse who’s not keeping the house signs a quick claim deed over to the spouse who is keeping the house.

I found that, that might be a better way to address this problem, because it really is quite a quandry and especially some of the divorce attorneys think that they’re really accomplishing something by forcing the spouse who’s staying in the house to refinance the house by a certain date, but it ends up being a moot point because they cant refinance, they can’t sell the house and there is really nothing either spouse can do. So I found this to be a much better way to address a problem which down the road can lead to a lot of heartache.

Again my name is Mike Griener. I’m bankruptcy attorney with the financial law group in Warren and our phone number is 586-693-2000 and our web site is financiallawgroup.com